Georgetown To RFK On A New Gold Line?

• May 18th

by UrbanTurf Staff

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With the Commanders stadium set to open in 2030, Metro has been under pressure to answer a straightforward question: how do you move 65,000 fans in and out of a site that the existing Stadium-Armory station can only clear at a rate of roughly 14,000 people per hour?

The transit agency's answer, presented to its board last week, is a new bus rapid transit line it's calling the Gold Line — a dedicated bus corridor that would run along H Street NE and Benning Road NE, connecting the stadium campus to Union Station.

But Metro CEO Randy Clarke has bigger ambitions than just handling game-day crowds. In a new interview on the Dream City Podcast, Clarke described the Gold Line as eventually running all the way from Georgetown to RFK, noting that this would fix both traffic issues in the neighborhood and the long-standing issue of a lack of a Metro station. 

For now, the Gold Line proposal would place dedicated median bus lanes along the corridor, walled off from regular traffic, allowing buses to bypass congestion and run as frequently as every three minutes on game days. Longer term, Metro envisions extending the line across the Anacostia River to the Benning Road Metro station, with the western end eventually pushing through K Street to Rosslyn.

A new rail station near the stadium, which had been floated during the DC Council's debate over the RFK deal, was taken off the table. Metro cited a price tag north of $1 billion just to realign the curved tracks in the area — before a station could even be built — and said it wouldn't be ready by opening day regardless. The Gold Line, paired with major capacity upgrades to Stadium-Armory itself (new mezzanines, escalators, elevators, and an expanded north entrance), is what Metro is putting forward instead.

The road ahead is far from clear. Metro and the District need to finalize new funding agreements this summer just to keep planning and design on track, with design-build procurement not expected to begin until winter 2027 and construction targeted for 2028 — a tight window before the stadium's 2030 opening. The $600 million Transportation Improvement Fund underpinning all of it remains unfunded. As for Clarke's vision of a line stretching all the way to Georgetown, that's further still — a long-term aspiration with no committed funding, no defined route west of Rosslyn, and a new mayor yet to be elected who will ultimately decide whether to get behind it. 

This article originally published at https://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/georgetown_to_rfk_on_a_new_gold_line/24635.